A brief rant about my Linux experience.

[Nothinman]

If you are telling me that Linux never needs any updates or does them all with less user intervention im saying you are talking out of your ass.

I've had the same Debian installation at home for ~6 years. All of my machines' maintenance is 99% automated, they email me when they need something done by hand which is pretty rare and usually amounts to 1 or 2 commands. Yes, once a Linux box is setup it's a lot less maintenance to keep running well.

No, no, and no. Windows 95 was the first true MS Operating System, it emulated DOS
(still does) but was not running on top of it. Windows 3.xx and before were Operating Environments running on top of the Operating System, DOS.

No, Win95, Win98 and WinME were all just 32-bit Windows running on top of DOS. MS just did a better job of hiding bolts so the integration seemed better.

The X server is not part of Linux. The real issue is that people are not paid to develop it so it's a hobbyist environment...

There's no corporate entity behind Xorg, Linux, Gnome, etc but they're far from developed for free. IBM, Sun, Cisco, HP, RedHat, SuSe/Novell, etc all have developers on their payroll. And IMO it's the fact that there's no corporation driving their development that makes them so good, there's no marketing team announcing features that aren't done or pushing for release dates that are too early. Yes there are problems, but they'll get worked out eventually.

 

[Platypus]

Originally posted by: halik

Originally posted by: CorporateRecreation

Originally posted by: trinketsummoner

Originally posted by: sciencewhiz

Originally posted by: darkamulets
Remember Linux to the home-user is free only if your time is worth nothing.

Absolutely. However, you spend more time maintaining windows then you do setting up Linux.

How do you work that one out? I run XP MCE on my PC, i have xp updates autodownload, i have AVG AV that auto updates and i have a hardware firewall that i rarely need to update. I check once a month for various graphic/mobo drivers etc, but really you dont need to update those if your PC is stable.

If you are telling me that Linux never needs any updates or does them all with less user intervention im saying you are talking out of your ass.

In both FreeBSD or any BSD flavor for that matter, Gentoo Linux, etc it is one command to rebuild your world, which in essence updates all your software automatically. As far as software that is.. your kernel still needs to be updated by hand (which is a good thing).

And then came reality - if you don't do emerge -u system and emerge -u -p world every month, your system will sqew so far off the portage that you can't update anything. I have 3 gentoo boxes runnign around me and two of them can't be updated due to portage conflicts...

That's not been my experience at all... but if you cannot be arsed to write a one line cron job to run once every month then you shouldn't be complaining in the first place.

 

[halik]

Originally posted by: CorporateRecreation

Originally posted by: halik

Originally posted by: CorporateRecreation

Originally posted by: trinketsummoner

Originally posted by: sciencewhiz

Originally posted by: darkamulets
Remember Linux to the home-user is free only if your time is worth nothing.

Absolutely. However, you spend more time maintaining windows then you do setting up Linux.

How do you work that one out? I run XP MCE on my PC, i have xp updates autodownload, i have AVG AV that auto updates and i have a hardware firewall that i rarely need to update. I check once a month for various graphic/mobo drivers etc, but really you dont need to update those if your PC is stable.

If you are telling me that Linux never needs any updates or does them all with less user intervention im saying you are talking out of your ass.

In both FreeBSD or any BSD flavor for that matter, Gentoo Linux, etc it is one command to rebuild your world, which in essence updates all your software automatically. As far as software that is.. your kernel still needs to be updated by hand (which is a good thing).

And then came reality - if you don't do emerge -u system and emerge -u -p world every month, your system will sqew so far off the portage that you can't update anything. I have 3 gentoo boxes runnign around me and two of them can't be updated due to portage conflicts...

That's not been my experience at all... but if you cannot be arsed to write a one line cron job to run once every month then you shouldn't be complaining in the first place.

you're a fool if you have cron run emerge -u world monthly...
My sunbox is completly portage-dead, i don't update it often and the new make profiles are completly incompatible to the ones they had before. I ran emerge -u system earlier this month, it updated portage and broke everything else. No i can't even emerge sync...

 

[Platypus]

Originally posted by: halik

Originally posted by: CorporateRecreation

Originally posted by: halik

Originally posted by: CorporateRecreation

Originally posted by: trinketsummoner

Originally posted by: sciencewhiz

Originally posted by: darkamulets
Remember Linux to the home-user is free only if your time is worth nothing.

Absolutely. However, you spend more time maintaining windows then you do setting up Linux.

How do you work that one out? I run XP MCE on my PC, i have xp updates autodownload, i have AVG AV that auto updates and i have a hardware firewall that i rarely need to update. I check once a month for various graphic/mobo drivers etc, but really you dont need to update those if your PC is stable.

If you are telling me that Linux never needs any updates or does them all with less user intervention im saying you are talking out of your ass.

In both FreeBSD or any BSD flavor for that matter, Gentoo Linux, etc it is one command to rebuild your world, which in essence updates all your software automatically. As far as software that is.. your kernel still needs to be updated by hand (which is a good thing).

And then came reality - if you don't do emerge -u system and emerge -u -p world every month, your system will sqew so far off the portage that you can't update anything. I have 3 gentoo boxes runnign around me and two of them can't be updated due to portage conflicts...

That's not been my experience at all... but if you cannot be arsed to write a one line cron job to run once every month then you shouldn't be complaining in the first place.

you're a fool if you have cron run emerge -u world monthly...

Who says I do, but you seem to be convinced it's required to update at all.. considering I have about 10 different boxen running Gentoo, most of them from 2003,2004 and they work just fine when grabbing the 2005 portage tree with a few simple commands I don't know what else to suggest to you.

 

[loic2003]

Well, thanks for the positive replies despite my negative OP.

The goal I had in mind was to get it going as a basic desktop to do my basic day to day jobs on it, including the usual e-mail, surfing and IM (all of which does already work and to be honest I quite like it). I was also looking to port quake 3 over to it to have a bash at gaming on a linux machine, as in my opinion a machine that can play a game with sound and hardware-accelerated graphics is a machine that is running well and would be a decent sign that the OS + drivers have installed properly.

Despite what M00T has said above, my colleague raves about the RPM installation method and has introduced me to pbone.net which has an RPM for the latest version of the NVidia drivers for fedora 4. I'm going to give this a try, as well as re-installing linux but performing a complete installation with pretty much every accessory in order to minimize frustration due to missing packages/whatever.


Edit: does anyone actually know how to prevent fedora/KDE from opening a new window each time I click on a directory/sub directory?

 

[Platypus]

Originally posted by: loic2003
Well, thanks for the positive replies despite my negative OP.

The goal I had in mind was to get it going as a basic desktop to do my basic day to day jobs on it, including the usual e-mail, surfing and IM (all of which does already work and to be honest I quite like it). I was also looking to port quake 3 over to it to have a bash at gaming on a linux machine, as in my opinion a machine that can play a game with sound and hardware-accelerated graphics is a machine that is running well and would be a decent sign that the OS + drivers have installed properly.

Despite what M00T has said above, my colleague raves about the RPM installation method and has introduced me to pbone.net which has an RPM for the latest version of the NVidia drivers for fedora 4. I'm going to give this a try, as well as re-installing linux but performing a complete installation with pretty much every accessory in order to minimize frustration due to missing packages/whatever.

If you're using Linux as an internet chat machine / game box I have to ask why bother? Also m00t is correct, RPM's are disgusting and archaic.. your coworker sounds none too bright.

 

[loic2003]

Originally posted by: CorporateRecreation

Originally posted by: loic2003
Well, thanks for the positive replies despite my negative OP.

The goal I had in mind was to get it going as a basic desktop to do my basic day to day jobs on it, including the usual e-mail, surfing and IM (all of which does already work and to be honest I quite like it). I was also looking to port quake 3 over to it to have a bash at gaming on a linux machine, as in my opinion a machine that can play a game with sound and hardware-accelerated graphics is a machine that is running well and would be a decent sign that the OS + drivers have installed properly.

Despite what M00T has said above, my colleague raves about the RPM installation method and has introduced me to pbone.net which has an RPM for the latest version of the NVidia drivers for fedora 4. I'm going to give this a try, as well as re-installing linux but performing a complete installation with pretty much every accessory in order to minimize frustration due to missing packages/whatever.

If you're using Linux as an internet chat machine / game box I have to ask why bother? Also m00t is correct, RPM's are disgusting and archaic.. your coworker sounds none too bright.

Disgusting? What's a more modern/better alternative? What about this 'yum' update or the Up2Date or whatever it is built into fedora? Or do you think the only decent way to install the GPU driver is the terminal/compile/etc method?

cheers.

 

[Platypus]

Originally posted by: loic2003

Originally posted by: CorporateRecreation

Originally posted by: loic2003
Well, thanks for the positive replies despite my negative OP.

The goal I had in mind was to get it going as a basic desktop to do my basic day to day jobs on it, including the usual e-mail, surfing and IM (all of which does already work and to be honest I quite like it). I was also looking to port quake 3 over to it to have a bash at gaming on a linux machine, as in my opinion a machine that can play a game with sound and hardware-accelerated graphics is a machine that is running well and would be a decent sign that the OS + drivers have installed properly.

Despite what M00T has said above, my colleague raves about the RPM installation method and has introduced me to pbone.net which has an RPM for the latest version of the NVidia drivers for fedora 4. I'm going to give this a try, as well as re-installing linux but performing a complete installation with pretty much every accessory in order to minimize frustration due to missing packages/whatever.

If you're using Linux as an internet chat machine / game box I have to ask why bother? Also m00t is correct, RPM's are disgusting and archaic.. your coworker sounds none too bright.

Disgusting? What's a more modern/better alternative? What about this 'yum' update or the Up2Date or whatever it is built into fedora? Or do you think the only decent way to install the GPU driver is the terminal/compile/etc method?

cheers.

Portage, ports, or the Debian apt-get system all are better package managers. They automatically grab dependencies unlike RPM where you have to hunt and peck for RPM's to satisfy other RPM's only to find you need different RPM's to support the ones you needed to fix the original problem, etc.

I would suggest dumping Fedora altogether but since you dont really seem to use Linux for anything it was meant to do then there really isn't gain in using another distro.. as far as those tools they're garbage in my eyes, but to each their own.

Furthermore you cannot compile the graphics driver since there is no source code for them.. they come as precompiled binaries usually embedded into shell scripts.

 

[sourceninja]

Originally posted by: skaceAs far as linux goes, it won't be a windows replacement until it can do everything windows can do and better. This means I should expect to be able to download a precompiled video driver in linux and install it, possibly without even rebooting.

Thats possible now. Open Syanptic if you use debian or ubuntu and select the nvidia driver or ati driver and install it. Wow, just as easy as windows. Or if you want to save time just apt-get nvidia-glx on the command line, or emerge nvidia-glx if you use gentoo. If you are using a good distro you should NEVER need to compile normal things like drivers and common apps that everyone uses and loves. Just because its not a double click exe does not mean its easier. I personally find synatpic easier to use then opeing a brower and navigaiting a website to find drivers.

In fact you wont need to reboot, just tell X what video driver to use (best done in xorg.conf) and re-launch X (control alt backspace) Boom, new video driver and everything is fun. Hell most distros will even change the xorg.conf for you. I have yet to find something in windows that is easier to do then in linux except running windows apps. Sure I use evolution instead of Outlook, or openoffice instead of MS office, but is all just as easy as windows to me. In fact, I find I have more trouble now with windows then I have with linux because I'm not used to the windows way. I hate hunting for software to install and finding my CD keys. I hate searching websites for software (the gentoo software list is huge) and I hate using google to find settings for things I want to tweak. I know all the linux tricks, but the windows ones are becomming lost to me. Its about what you know when it comes to easy.

 

[FoBoT]

your hardware was too good

if you have good hardware, you must be gaming. there aren't any (ok, loki used to make some, sure) linux games, so if you are running linux, you should use older/crappier hardware so that you don't have to jerk around with drivers

so if you are a gamer with good hardware, stay with windows and setup a second crappy box to run linux on and surf the internut and junk

 

[Platypus]

loic2003 shoot me a PM sometime as this will most likely get moved to OS. If you want to learn from scratch I'll be happy to help you.

 

[Nothinman]

Portage, ports, or the Debian apt-get system all are better package managers. They automatically grab dependencies unlike RPM where you have to hunt and peck for RPM's to satisfy other RPM's only to find you need different RPM's to support the ones you needed to fix the original problem, etc.

You're ignoring the fact that Fedora ships yum now to handle dependency resolution and that fact that RPM is equivalent to dpkg on Debian which also doesn't grab dependencies automatically. Try comparing tools that attempt to do a similar job. And portage is crap, it won't even do dependency checking on package removal.

Furthermore you cannot compile the graphics driver since there is no source code for them.. they come as precompiled binaries usually embedded into shell scripts.

No, but you do compile the wrapper code which is distributed in source form by nVidia.

 

[loic2003]

Originally posted by: FoBoT
your hardware was too good

if you have good hardware, you must be gaming. there aren't any (ok, loki used to make some, sure) linux games, so if you are running linux, you should use older/crappier hardware so that you don't have to jerk around with drivers

so if you are a gamer with good hardware, stay with windows and setup a second crappy box to run linux on and surf the internut and junk

It's an old box, 1.333 athlon, Geforce 3, 512RAM.

Originally posted by: CorporateRecreation


Portage, ports, or the Debian apt-get system all are better package managers. They automatically grab dependencies unlike RPM where you have to hunt and peck for RPM's to satisfy other RPM's only to find you need different RPM's to support the ones you needed to fix the original problem, etc.

I would suggest dumping Fedora altogether but since you dont really seem to use Linux for anything it was meant to do then there really isn't gain in using another distro.. as far as those tools they're garbage in my eyes, but to each their own.

Furthermore you cannot compile the graphics driver since there is no source code for them.. they come as precompiled binaries usually embedded into shell script

I know I'm p!ssed at it at the moment, but I'm still willing to input more time and get this thing going, if out of curiosity and a sense of accomplishment if nothing else.

So what distribution would you suggest? Debian?

As for the graphics driver, yeah it was a binry, the command was sh NVidia-versionno.run
to get it going. It didn't finish however, so what do you think is the issue if it's not a c-compiler issue? I'll post the actual error message shortly when I return home...

 

[AmigaMan]

just wanted to add my 2cents in here. I have an Inspiron 9200 laptop that I installed Ubuntu 5.10 "Breezy Badger" onto last night. It automagically detected my wireless card during install, asked if I wanted to use it or my wired ethernet port. I selected the wireless, entered my SSID and WEP key and was off and running shortly thereafter. I then installed the ATI drivers for my Radeon Mobility 9700 by following some instructions I found after 2 seconds of googling. Pretty simple and works great.

I don't see why everyone keeps having problems with linux. Perhaps it's all the kiddies coming into the Linux world expecting it to be exactly like Windows. NEWSFLASH: LINUX IS NOT WINDOWS, DON'T EXPECT IT TO OPERATE JUST LIKE WINDOWS! If you're patient and expect things to be different, then it will work out for you. When I came over from Windows 3.11 to Windows 95, it took a while to get used to how different everything was. The same goes for Linux.

 

[midwestfisherman]

So the moral to this thread is...

if you're a noob....stay away from linux
if you want to stick a cd in and let it do everything for you (i.e. Windoze)....stay away from linux

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: midwestfisherman
So the moral to this thread is...

if you're a noob....stay away from linux
if you want to stick a cd in and let it do everything for you (i.e. Windoze)....stay away from linux

This guy was more or less posting his experience on how horrible linux is to install/setup/maintain from a COMMON SENSE point of view.

Almost all distros are stuck with features and dialogues that remind me of Windows 95.

 

[AmigaMan]

Originally posted by: midwestfisherman
So the moral to this thread is...

if you're a noob....stay away from linux
if you want to stick a cd in and let it do everything for you (i.e. Windoze)....stay away from linux

That's just it, I basically stuck a CD in, started the installation, it partitioned my drive automagically so I could dual boot windows, setup my wireless card, installed a free Office suite (Open Office 2.0) and it was all done quicker than Windows could ever do it. I have it set to prompt me to install new updates, it's stable, never needs rebooting (but I have to since I'm a laptop), and "just works". While I'm not a noob, this is all extremely easy stuff anyone can do if they're willing.

 

[Nothinman]

if you're a noob....stay away from linux
if you want to stick a cd in and let it do everything for you (i.e. Windoze)....stay away from linux

Not really, I can't remember the last time I was able to install Windows without having to feed it a dozen driver disks.

 

[silverpig]

Originally posted by: AmigaMan
just wanted to add my 2cents in here. I have an Inspiron 9200 laptop that I installed Ubuntu 5.10 "Breezy Badger" onto last night. It automagically detected my wireless card during install, asked if I wanted to use it or my wired ethernet port. I selected the wireless, entered my SSID and WEP key and was off and running shortly thereafter. I then installed the ATI drivers for my Radeon Mobility 9700 by following some instructions I found after 2 seconds of googling. Pretty simple and works great.

I don't see why everyone keeps having problems with linux. Perhaps it's all the kiddies coming into the Linux world expecting it to be exactly like Windows. NEWSFLASH: LINUX IS NOT WINDOWS, DON'T EXPECT IT TO OPERATE JUST LIKE WINDOWS! If you're patient and expect things to be different, then it will work out for you. When I came over from Windows 3.11 to Windows 95, it took a while to get used to how different everything was. The same goes for Linux.

Okay, so I have XP SP2 and installed it on my Inspiron 9200. Install goes okay, but then I get to the activation part. Internet? WTF? I bought this... Gah, okay so I let it connect. Connection not found. Can't validate. Huh? Fine okay, well we'll skip it. So I finally get into windows and it looks alright. Gotta go find the drivers. So I fire up internet explorer and up pops a message about the missing internet connection again. Something about no connection found? But my wireless router is right beside it. Oh right, no drivers. I'll just download... erm. So after my friend comes over with my drivers burned onto a cd, I finally get the thing up and running. Okay, time to play some half-life2. Pull up a command prompt and type:

install halflife2
'install' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.

What? I can't just tell my computer to install something? Geez. Turns out I gotta get this thing called Steam first, and then hl2. Damn, this is way too hard. Screw it.

See? Windows can be hard if you don't know what you're doing too.

<disclaimer> This wasn't my REAL experience, it's made up for illustration of a point

 

[sourceninja]

Originally posted by: FoBoT
your hardware was too good

if you have good hardware, you must be gaming. there aren't any (ok, loki used to make some, sure) linux games, so if you are running linux, you should use older/crappier hardware so that you don't have to jerk around with drivers

so if you are a gamer with good hardware, stay with windows and setup a second crappy box to run linux on and surf the internut and junk

Thats just bull. UT2004, Quake 4, Doom 3, neverwinter nights, tons of games I run with cedega (hl2, wow, counter strike, etc)

I have zero driver issues with my system

DFI lanparty Ultra-D
2 gigs ram
amd64 3500
nvidia 6800GT 256 meg
SATA 300 gig drives
using on board nvidia lan and sound in 5.1 config.

Not a single driver had to be compiled from source, all were in my distro's package manager, all of them required no more then 2 minutes at most to setup (I had to edit one config file to get OSS emulation working for sound and I had to change my xorg.conf to use nvidia).

yes a hard core gamer should not use linux, but linux is fine on neweer hardware. If you use older hardware you might not be impressed with performance and then thats just one more linux complaint.

 

[Wapp]

GO GO UBUNTU! All I had to do was update the video drivers and change the refresh rate on my monitor, both of which were easily answered via the ubuntu forums. Right now I'm messing around with WINE to see what I can do with it.

 

[trmiv]

Originally posted by: rmrf
R

did you try the Fedora FAQ?

I have nothing to add to this thread other than the fact that the guy that runs fedorafaq.org used to be my manager. Just wanted to get that in.

 

[AmigaMan]

Originally posted by: silverpig

Originally posted by: AmigaMan
just wanted to add my 2cents in here. I have an Inspiron 9200 laptop that I installed Ubuntu 5.10 "Breezy Badger" onto last night. It automagically detected my wireless card during install, asked if I wanted to use it or my wired ethernet port. I selected the wireless, entered my SSID and WEP key and was off and running shortly thereafter. I then installed the ATI drivers for my Radeon Mobility 9700 by following some instructions I found after 2 seconds of googling. Pretty simple and works great.

I don't see why everyone keeps having problems with linux. Perhaps it's all the kiddies coming into the Linux world expecting it to be exactly like Windows. NEWSFLASH: LINUX IS NOT WINDOWS, DON'T EXPECT IT TO OPERATE JUST LIKE WINDOWS! If you're patient and expect things to be different, then it will work out for you. When I came over from Windows 3.11 to Windows 95, it took a while to get used to how different everything was. The same goes for Linux.

Okay, so I have XP SP2 and installed it on my Inspiron 9200. Install goes okay, but then I get to the activation part. Internet? WTF? I bought this... Gah, okay so I let it connect. Connection not found. Can't validate. Huh? Fine okay, well we'll skip it. So I finally get into windows and it looks alright. Gotta go find the drivers. So I fire up internet explorer and up pops a message about the missing internet connection again. Something about no connection found? But my wireless router is right beside it. Oh right, no drivers. I'll just download... erm. So after my friend comes over with my drivers burned onto a cd, I finally get the thing up and running. Okay, time to play some half-life2. Pull up a command prompt and type:

install halflife2
'install' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.

What? I can't just tell my computer to install something? Geez. Turns out I gotta get this thing called Steam first, and then hl2. Damn, this is way too hard. Screw it.

See? Windows can be hard if you don't know what you're doing too.

<disclaimer> This wasn't my REAL experience, it's made up for illustration of a point

I'm not sure what you're trying to say? Are you agreeing or disagreeing with me? I was making the point that Linux IS easy, just different.

BTW, my Windows XP experience is exactly the same as yours was regarding the Inspiron 9200. After reinstalling Windows for the 3rd time I quickly realized I needed to burn the drivers to a CD to make life easier next time.

 

[Trey22]

Not too keen on Linux right now either... I swear Ubuntu flipped me off more than once while conifguring shares.

 

[yhelothar]

Originally posted by: AnonymouseUser
For a standard desktop system you don't need the 3D-accelerated Nvidia driver, so why were you trying to install it?

Also, yum sucks and Fedora Core isn't for noobs.

You need it for Tux Racer!